Best Bets for Week 10
Plus a week 9 review
Week 9 review
Some say it doesn’t matter how much you win, but a win is a win. Welp we had a winning week last week going up a whopping 0.06 units thanks to Tee Higgins. Everyone has their own unit sizes but if you bet $100 per unit, that would’ve been enough to get you a Chick Fila breakfast burrito for the week after taxes. If you’ve never had one before I highly recommend, just not today because they’re closed.
There’s been some weird some stuff going on in terms of team tendencies and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. The Browns have obviously been a constant for how dominant they’ve been on defense, but we have some weird cases like the Seahawks.
Through Week 6 we saw the Seahawks be a top 5 rushing defense in all metrics. Since then? They been the worst in Rush EPA per play and bottom five across the board in all defensive rush metrics.
This is obviously the trap with small sample sizes, but to be at both end of the extremes is still a little odd. Right around Weeks 4-5 I start slowly accounting for the metrics for teams on the season to get an idea for who is strong in certain areas and use those to help guide my plays. Right now it’s a massive part of my process.
But we have to take into account football is a fragile game and very random at times. It’s felt like more than ever there’s been pristine matchups for defenses to shut down an opposing QB or RB and a massive shift in game script has forced a loss due to volume.
I don’t have any data yet to specifically back up this claim yet, but in a world where game totals unders are hitting more than ever in the NFL, the unders we’ve been placing haven’t been hitting at the rate they have in the past.
Again this is all small sample right now and we still have half the season left, but I think my conclusion has come due to two things: First, there’s very few dominant teams either in the rushing defense market or the passing defense market consistently on a week to week basis. And second and likely the biggest reason is, sportsbooks have heavily adjusted to stats like DVOA and when releasing lines they’ve been much more efficient at tackling these specific plays.
Last year it almost felt like cheating a lot when we would just target unders of RBs against the Titans defense regardless of what they dropped and when we are doing the same this year there’s more fluctuation.
I’ve really simplified my process over the past year or two when it comes to these types of things and saw some impressive results from it. This year while this process hasn’t necessarily been bad, it’s not as strong as I’ve wanted it to be.
I’ve noticed this the past couple weeks, but I haven’t budged as much due to seeing out some more sample and variance to get a better idea. But because every season is unique and this one just isn’t the same as most seasons, I think it’s time to at least consider tweaking the process just a bit.
What exactly is that going to look like? I’m not sure. But the results need to be better and that’s on me to figure it out and adjust with the season.
Underdog Play of the Week
There wasn’t a play last week due to my Underdog account getting hacked due to someone getting ahold of my passwords and I couldn’t even see the props to be able to screenshot or send anything here. Don’t worry everything is fine and the Underdog team has been super helpful in terms of working on this with me.
So… yeah felt like that deserved an explanation.
In Week 8 we had ANOTHER five play Pick ‘Em miss on the fifth leg. I have officialy placed six five play Pick ‘Em’s as “Plays of the Week” and four of those six have hit four of the five legs and exactly zero have won.
And to make matters worse two of those six missed by one single stat. So run bad? Yup.
Not even correlated with the O’Connell but going to the drawing board on this one and just trying to see one go in here.
NFL Futures
I added some NFL futures this week for the season. Mainly on win totals for a few teams I think will underperform the rest of the year. I’ll place those at the end of the Substack for susbscribers.
Plays of the Week
Brandon Aiyuk over 64.5 receiving -115 (DraftKings)
Jaguars are the 5th biggest pass funnel defense in the league.
Against WRs they’ve been one of the best against slot WRs but one of the worst against outside WRs in production per game. Aiyuk plays primary outside with 79% of his snaps aligned out there.
Aiyuk has had elite usage metrics this year with 28% target share. The Jaguars are the highest rated team so far this season the 49ers have faced according to DVOA.
There’s less of a scenario where we see a full 49ers blowout that could lead to game script concerns for Aiyuk in this matchup vs other ones.
Risk 1.15 units to win 1 unit
Play to 66.5